


La Fantômme de l'Opéra

by TwistedWillows



Category: Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: F/F, Lesbian Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 05:17:21
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18004529
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TwistedWillows/pseuds/TwistedWillows
Summary: In a different Paris, where Raoul is Renée and a mysterious ghost named Erica haunts the depths of the Parisian Opera House, how would the Phantom of the Opera change?





	La Fantômme de l'Opéra

**Author's Note:**

> REALLY IMPORTANT NOTES please read these thank you ~~I have too many feelings about Phantom of the Opera okay~~
> 
> So I might be kind of obsessed with Phantom of the Opera. And I have a _lot_ (like, a lot) of thoughts about this story and what makes the characters how they are and why, etc. And I have to say this thought- "What if it was LESBIAN phantom of the opera?" was honestly kind of a joke at first. I really dislike stories which get rewritten solely for making straight characters LGBTQ; I'd much rather read a new story entirely with those LGBTQ characters. But the more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Writing a lesbian romance in early 1900's Paris is quite different from writing a heterosexual romance in early 1900's Paris. And the muse of inspiration strikes where she will, so *shrug* have this, I suppose. I have so many ideas about the femslashphantom. It's not even funny. I'm tempted to thought puke, but I don't really have a medium where I would put that kind of rant, so. *shrug* You know what, have a thing. Have _this_ thing, I hope it's not detestable.

_THE FIRST TIME SHE SAYS IT_ , they’re children. Christine is barely five years old and Renée is nine, now, and positive she knows everything about the world (except a few things, like how tall is Notre Dame and where do the frogs go during wintertime, but those are hard things and nobody knows those, really) and she’s sitting on the side of a riverbank in a halo of white sunlight, watching the flower stems twist and dance in the breeze, and Christine in all her velveteen splendour is splashing in the river, squealing with happiness as she chases the wriggling silver streaks of tiny minnows from one end of the tide pool to the next. That’s what Renée notices first, those bright peals of laughter like popping firewood as Christine’s small and uncoordinated hands slip and slide and are constantly thwarted by the zip-zag of tiny silver bodies. Renée would be playing in the river, too, but she’s just gotten a new gown. It’s white lace and blue chiffon and the elegant swoops and curves drape over her skin like the gauzy wings of a butterfly and she mustn’t get it dirty, so instead she sits like a hen with her feet pulled gracefully underneath her and she draws in her journal without purpose. Christine’s joyful voice lilts over the rocks and brushes the sand like the crystal water she’s swimming in. Renée tilts her head up, observes for a few more moments, then absently adds two lines to her drawing; an elegant nose, the curvature of two cherub lips.  
“You mustn’t fall Christine.” She reminds the younger girl without looking up from the parchment in her lap. Their parents have entrusted her with young Christine’s safety today. It’s an important task, and a lot of responsibility to give to a nine-year-old. She knows five-year-olds can get hurt in a lot of ways outside. They’re clumsy and young and they do things that they shouldn’t, so she watches Christine carefully, and listens to the songbirds that imitate her laughter, their pretty voices echoing through the trees. She’s just finished the last delicate mark on the girl in her drawing when the laughter is abruptly sliced by the sound of a shocked gasp. She looked up just in time to see Christine’s pruned palm slipping off of a sharp rock and the thin line of red, left behind, begin gushing scarlet liquid. Renée abruptly stands and drops her notebook on the ground. Bewildered, Christine brings the injury to her face, watches the blood run with the look of a man seeing rainbows refracted across a wall for the first time, and then she begins to wail. Renée wastes no time. She gathers her skirts and races through the waving faces of the field flowers like a deer, darting nimbly to the edge of the river where she settles in a flutter of blue skirts at Christine’s side. She gingerly raises her hand to clasp the injury.  
“Hurts.” Is all Christine says, and Renée takes the proffered hand like an unbroken macaron shell and holds it out in the sunlight to examine it. She laughs, and she wants to tell Christine that its nothing, and she’s silly for crying about it, but then Christine’s pink lip wibbles and instead, she takes the palm and presses a gentle kiss on top. “Don’t worry Christine,” she tells the smaller girl, “I won’t let you get hurt.” 

 

_THE SECOND TIME SHE SAYS IT_ they’re young adults and her father has been determinedly trying to marry her off for the past too-many years. Her mother has passed away. They laid her to rest in the cemetery on the lavender hill and Renée feels the light dimmed in her household without her soft, supple curves and the warmth of her smile- and in the repeated, heavy _thud_ of her father’s boots trampling ruts into the staircase.  
“You must be married,” he tells her, wisps of greyed hair billowing out around his face like the mane of a wild lion. “You’ll have no future if you’re not married before you’re 18. The men will think you’re a hag. _Unmarriable_.” Renée finds this conversation dreadful, and as the man lectures, frantically, she is busy making ripples with her finger in the bird bath.  
“I’ll do what I must.”  
“You’ll not be able to do anything at all.”  
“I will manage just fine.”  
“You will manage _nothing_ without a husband!”

Her home is unpleasant and she endeavours to be away from it, spending her time instead in the city and the markets. She learns about tailoring and business and passes long hours by the docks with the fishermen, listening to the lilt of strange languages and watching the waves roll blue onto the beach.  
Christine is getting older now, young and beautiful, the child who bubbled out laughter growing into a gentle pre-teen with eyes like low tide, and she meets Renée in the city where they walk arm-in-arm through the streets, waving their skirts at the pigeons and speaking of each thing that passes their minds and laughing at the breeze and huddling closer against the chill. Christine wants to be a dancer. Renée watches as she floats down the stalls like a sparrow on a beam wind, a tiny ballerina freed from her music box. Christine loves the pretty things and she lets her finger pads run along the dresses as they pass by and Renée watches the strands of brown curls flying out of her bun in the wind and tucks them back in for her. They spin through the streets and fly up the steps of Monte Martre and Renée buys her pretty dresses and elegant hairpins to tuck behind her ears.  
Their friendship is sunlight and lilacs, cherry tarts and sips of rosewater under a shady Oak, and they twirl through the years with laughter-light promises that they shall never change, shall become the old maidens of Paris together, (because Renée dislikes men and Christine insists, somehow, that she is ugly and unmarriable, and Renée cannot fathom how she thinks so). And Renée does not question the feelings of love in her heart, only is glad they are there, until one day she looks at Christine as she slips into her chemise and she notices the delicate shape of her breasts beneath broadcloth and something strikes her near her appendix, a sharp kind of thing, and suddenly she keeps noticing the delicate shape underneath the broadcloth, and Renée feels her teeth digging into her cheek.  
Renée thinks long and hard that day. But then she is leaving, off to study in faraway lands (her father’s only solution for her refusal to marry, to send her to finishing school abroad) and Christine is gone and the event is long past.  
Renée finds that she likes school. She finds that she’s good at school. She learns the subjects her father requests, the classes to teach girls how to spin thread like little spiders and twirl around the floor like spinning tops on Noël. She learns the other subjects, too. Things like math and economics, how the market behaves and why businesses succeed and fail. Christine is far away, their letters have slowed, and Renée’s head is full of numbers and science and formulas. The years pass like pages Renée turns in financial books and Renée learns and keeps learning and learning and learning.  
One Christmas there is a ball. Renée attends, standing like a stoic queen, preening with the confidence of her ever-augmenting knowledge, and she watches as the couples fly across the floor and cast wavering shadows in the firelight, the rainbow of skirts twirling brilliantly under the candles and the sound of laughter mixing into the music, until she catches someone’s eye. She has blonde hair and green eyes like the forest and she’s dancing more brilliantly than any one of the other couples on the floor. She spins like a windmill and laughs like a nymph and her gaze, like two tiny green flames, is locked on Renée’s bright red corset.  
That night, the girl re-ties the strings of her corset around her wrists and dances her down onto her bed and Renée thinks that maybe she doesn’t need to think anymore. At dawn, she is on a boat bound for Paris, drinking in the morning sun with a new fervour.  
She begins her trading business. Her success is the awe of the Parisian mercantile, and it’s not long before she has enough money to buy her _father’s_ business, so she does, and as she marches back and forth in the street, directing movers to help her put her things back into his home, her father looks at her with the expression of a man trying to decide if he is being marched to the guillotine or being lauded by the bloodthirsty crowd. 

There is a foreign visitor in the De Chagny household one day. Tall and pale and Nordic who speaks with a voice from lands far away and the next morning, there are whispers in the streets as she and Renée parade by, arm in arm, giggling and murmuring in a tongue the people of Paris do not understand. Then her guest leaves and Renée is pouring over stocks and charts and reading things to her father as the days go on and his cloudy eyes struggle to see.  
One day, it occurs to Renée that perhaps women don’t _do_ this, don’t fill up pages and pages with formulas and numbers or look at the shape of a woman in her dress and think about what she would look like if she pressed her over a table and put her hands in her hair. She thinks this once, watches the seagulls swooping low over the water, and it never bothers her again. The earth is round (another belief which time changed), inflation goes up, and people talk, as people will do.  
Her father was frantic at the news.  
“Please, Renée, you must do _something_!” (He’d given up on asking her to marry.) “The town has known you were strange since the beginning, but now the rumours are getting out of control!” But Renée did not care, and this only served to agitate him further. He paced frenetically as she sat in the parlour eating stew.  
“It will sabotage our business!” He declared, trying an angle he knew she would care about. But Renée was thinking of a sweet face with green eyes, and she responded,  
“If they disapprove of me so highly, let them stop buying my spices.”  
But they did not, and after a time her father quieted. And in the marketplace, he stopped speaking with the other merchants who made comments about his strange daughter and her strange female guest.  
(One day, a great many years later, he even told them that they were wrong.)

Somewhere, she hears that the dancers at the opera house are exquisite.  
She begins attending the operas.

 

_THE THIRD TIME SHE SAYS IT_ , it’s when she sees Christine again for the first time. She is glowing like a goddess of the moon, all bright doe eyes and soft stage smiles, and she’s _singing_ \- Renée had never known that Christine wanted to be a singer, but thank God she does, because she sounds like an angel and she looks like a bright new star and when she finishes her song, Renée leaps from her booth and shouts, “ _Bravo! Bravo!_ ” at the top of her lungs, and her only regret is that she didn’t bring roses. 

She starts seeing Christine again, and it’s all lilacs and cherry kisses like nothing had ever changed. 

 

_THE FOURTH TIME SHE SAYS IT_ , they’re on the roof. It’s dark outside and Christine is talking nonsense, something about a phantom- and Renée doesn’t know what that means and she doesn’t know how much of this phantom nonsense is real- but she _does_ know that Christine is shaking, and that’s the most real thing she needs as she draws Christine close and cradles her in her arms, shushing her lowly and rocking from one foot to the other. Christine keeps crying, face buried in Renée’s shawl, fisting large handfuls of fabric as she shudders. Renée has never been a superstitious woman. Her religion is numbers and transactions and the blood of her sacrament runs with the spices from faraway lands, but something is amiss at this opera house, something dark that reeks of evil and reminds Renée of the feeling she gets when her boat follows a bad headwind and gets blown into a storm.  
Whoever Erica, this woman- (for Renée does believe it is a woman) is, she vows that she will not hurt Christine again.  
As the snow falls on their heads and Christine gradually begins to relax in Renée’s arms, Renée closes her eyes and presses her nose to Christine’s silk-soft hair.  
“Don’t cry Christine. I’ll protect you.” She promises. 

 

_THE FIFTH TIME SHE SAYS IT_ she’s going to die. She knows that she’s going to die, with the same certainty that one knows, staring down the barrel of a gun, that this tiny black circle is the darkness of infinity, because the phantom has a rope in one hand and Christine in the other, and Renée could probably get out of this if she had all her wits about her, but she doesn’t; she sees that fragile little white palm eclipsed by the black leather of the phantom’s glove and she’s forgotten everything except that she’ll do anything, _anything_ , if Erica will just _let Christine go._  
“Please madam, kill me if you will but let her go.” She begs; she has no pride to hold onto anymore.  
“Such sinful intentions this woman has for you, Christine.” Erica’s teasing her, of all things? But she can’t even bring herself to hate Erica, not now, she’s too terrified to feel anything else. She looks at Christine, the delicate sparrow she had sworn she would protect- had she not made that promise in childhood, once? On a rooftop under the falling snow? She tries to sound brave, but her voice betrays her.  
“I’ll protect you Christine, I promised I would-” Erica gives the rope a wicked yank, and Renée gags as her airflow is violently cut off. Christine jerks forward, eyes blowing wide, but Erica’s fist tightens again and she freezes in her tracks.  
“Please,” she says, in that beautiful voice-  
“You already walk in the fires of hell, Christine. Come with your dark angel.”  
“Christ…ine.” Christine turns her tear-streaked face to Renée, and Renée swears that her heart stops in her chest. She knows that look. It’s the look she gave Christine on the day that she sailed away for England, when Christine came to meet her on the docks, dressed in that gorgeous white wedding gown with a veil shining like the heavenly stars- no, she’s wearing a wedding gown now. Renée’s oxygen supply is severely decreasing. If this is going to be the end…  
“Christ…ine, I-” she hopes Christine will understand.  
“Renée…” The phantom casts a glance between the two of them, and her eyes tighten underneath the mask.  
“Christine,” she hisses, “You cannot deny the wickedness of your own desires. Come with me.” For a few moments, everything goes black, and Renée feels like she’s floating…  
Then all the sudden the rope loosens and she comes back to reality coughing and gasping- just in time to see Erica take Christine’s face and kiss her. And that _hurts_ , given everything currently happening it probably shouldn’t hurt but it does- and Renée closes her eyes and coughs harder until she finally forces burning air back into her lungs, and there’s a moment of silence.  
“Christine…” Erica sounds like she’s about to cry. Renée forces her head up just in time to catch a glimpse of Erica’s expression behind the mutilated flesh; something vulnerable and awestruck and innocent all at the same time- before it changes, and Erica recoils from Christine like she burned her, jerks away and begins stalking through the water, deeper into the opera house. Renée watches, semi-delirious, and she doesn’t understand-  
But then Christine is there, touching her face and untying the ropes around her arms and Erica doesn’t matter anymore because Christine is speaking-  
“Renée please,” Christine is begging? And Renée’s hands are free and she slumps over onto Christine, pulls her close, and then they’re moving, rushing through the water, towards the light of the surface. Somehow, her hands find a boat and they climb inside and then she’s rowing them through the water until they hit hard ground. People are screaming. The oxygen is returning to Renée’s brain. As she sees the torchlight on the walls coming closer, hears the people demanding Erica’s head (they won’t find her, they never could), Renée looks down at Christine, and she just breathes. Christine is safe. She is alive for this moment.  
“Christine, you’re safe.” She whispers. Christine looks at her with a teary-eyed smile.

 

_THE SIXTH TIME SHE SAYS IT_ , everything is over.  
They’ve left Paris. There was an opera house in Toulouse which had failed, but Renée bought it and, slowly, they have rebuilt the elegant velvet-covered benches and the swooping balconies. They host carollers in winter and ballets in the spring and sometimes Christine sings with her beautiful voice, somehow different than she had before, something melancholy and yearning but somehow more beautiful than ever, and on those days Renée takes leave of her office and the papers she reviews to be sent back to Paris full of charters and checks, and she stands in the air shimmering with Christine’s ivory vibrato and lets the music massage her deep into her bones.  
Their manor is sunshine and partridges and lavender fields, and Renée thinks that her life could possibly be perfect in every possible way. There are still the nightmares, sometimes, Christine shrieking in the early hours of light, Renée waking up gasping for breath, hands clutching at the ghost of a noose around her neck, they hold each other close and Renée kisses Christine’s head and by morning they are both soundly at rest. Toulouse is bright and smells of apple blossoms and winterberries, and Renée wakes to each morning with a brand-new vigour.  
Sometimes she thinks about Erica. She knows that Christine does too. Sometimes the dark place in the back of her mind calls to her, the echo of a despairing voice calling over water, a phantom burn of a rope under the pearls she never removes. Sometimes she sees the look of glass in Christine’s eyes and the way her hands curl to fists on the rail as those blank eyes stare depthless into nothing.  
But as the sun emerges from behind dark clouds and the birds of Toulouse sing their songs, today, it doesn’t matter. And tomorrow it will matter less. 

“ _Renée_ ,” comes a quiet voice from the door to the terrace, and Renée turns around and feels her heart melt like butter as Christine steps out onto the balcony, the layers of her nightgown settling like crepe paper around her lean frame.  
“Christine,” she murmurs, and reaches out to delicately take Christine’s hand. She brings it to her lips and presses a kiss, and she’s looking Christine in the eyes as she says it, with the fresh Toulouse air filling her lungs,  
“Christine, I love you.” And she thinks that her life could possibly be perfect in every way.


End file.
